The Atheist News Podcast

There’s nothing we academics hate more than apparent infringements on our essential freedom to babble about whatever the hell we want whenever the hell we want and get paid for it.  Well, we also really hate it when meetings don’t provide free sandwiches.  Or when the coffee machine is broken.  Ooo, or when students show up to the last five minutes of office hours with some complicated question and prevent us from getting one of the free sandwiches left-over from the last meeting; we really hate that (undergraduates take note).  Still, infringements on our academic freedom are definitely in the top five things we hate.  That’s why I feel so personally offended by the news that Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has issued a memo forbidding its teaching staff from teaching, writing, or advocating on behalf of homosexuals or homosexual issues.  I’m shocked and incensed.

Oh wait, no I’m not.

Some background: Calvin College is a fundamentalist Evangelical school named after John Calvin, the pre-Enlightenment theologian who taught that humanity is so irredeemably evil (that damn brain-fruit incident again) that no matter what we do, we’re all going to hell.  All of us.  Forever.  All of us, that is, except for a special few–the so-called “Elect”–who have been predestined (before birth, even) to go to Heaven.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the Elect are overwhelmingly Calvinists.  I’ve actually met a few Calvinists, and even co-taught a philosophy course with one of them once–he’s a very nice guy, but as he was telling me about this belief system, I had to actively suppress my total incredulity: how could anyone actually buy that?  He had an incredibly sophisticated (from a philosophical standpoint) framework in which his Calvinism was embedded–that is, he had an account of how to make sense of things like free will, moral responsibility, and God’s omnibenevolence in the face of the doctrine of predestination–but I was still shocked that anyone living in the 21st century would endorse such a palpably Medieval theology.  But they do, and they even have accredited colleges to prove their legitimacy–fine, gay-bashing institutions like Calvin College.

Here’s the thing: suppose that you’re a newly-minted PhD on the job market for the first time.  You’re looking for that first faculty position, and are trying to find somewhere that will offer you a tenure-track position so you can stop teaching 6 adjunct courses for less than you were making as a graduate student.  And so you can, you know, eat.  Take a moment to cultivate that sense of accomplishment mixed with desperation.  Now suppose that you get a job offer!  Great!  Money!  Free sandwiches!  You walk down to the coffee shop to use their free wifi (you think you can afford your own Internet connection?  ha!) and read the following on the website of your potential new institution:

Vision

Calvin College is a comprehensive liberal arts college in the Reformed tradition of historic Christianity. Through our learning, we seek to be agents of renewal in the academy, church, and society. We pledge fidelity to Jesus Christ, offering our hearts and lives to do God’s work in God’s world.

Purpose

To engage in vigorous liberal arts education that promotes lifelong Christian service

We offer education that is shaped by Christian faith, thought, and practice. We study and address a world made good by God, distorted by sin, redeemed in Christ, and awaiting the fullness of God’s reign.

We aim to develop knowledge, understanding, and critical inquiry; encourage insightful and creative participation in society; and foster thoughtful, passionate Christian commitments.

What might your first thought be?  Well, supposing that you got your PhD through normal channels and are thus not a complete moron, it probably wouldn’t be:

“Gee, I bet they have very progressive policies when it comes to gay rights!  This is the perfect place for me to do my advocacy work.”

Indeed, if you were into that kind of thing, you’d almost certainly recognize “education that is shaped by Christian faith” as a well-known code-phrase for “no gays, please.”  It’s a shame that any academic institution works that way, and I applaud the people at Calvin College who are protesting this kind of abysmal policy, but can they honestly say they’re “shocked” or “outraged” by this policy?  I don’t think they seriously can–they knew what kind of institution they were signing on with when they got hired.  You don’t enlist in the US Army and then act outraged at the prospect of firing a gun: that’s what the Army does, and if you signed up you should have known that.  Religious fundamentalism and academic freedom don’t get along very well, but that’s just common sense.  I know the job market for academics is particularly bad right now, but at least keep this maxim in mind when you’re hunting: insane people have insane policies.  If you can’t deal with the insanity, don’t sign up.

The justice department has begun investigating and reviewing cases of “enhanced interrogation techniques” for any evidence of illegal activity. Naturally this has roused the ire of modern torture’s greatest advocate, former Vice President Dick Cheney. “It’s clearly a political move. There’s no other rationale for why they’re doing this.” Statements like this give the impression that it’s beyond Cheney’s comprehension that anyone could honestly believe torture to be ineffective in producing actionable intelligence. I bet Mr. Cheney is a big fan of 24.

Mr Cheney, like many defenders of this practice, seem to operate under the idea that those they see as “evil” can be consistently and methodically made to confess their “sins” after they experience enough pain. It doesn’t take that much research to find vaguely relevant scripture (a fundamentalist’s go-to tactic when faced with disagreement) and even historical examples of this mentality.

Of course rather than defend his side of the issue with anything but the vaguest of rationalizations, he instead prefers (and has preferred) to consider any dissent against torture or accountability for those who practice it as partisan whining by those who have no idea how to protect America. It’s inconsequential to him that torture galvanizes radical opposition, results in false information, encourages enemy use of torture, and every once in a while it will inevitably be used on innocent people.

Now there are a ton of reasons I could parade out about why torture is wrong, both religious and secular. For a minute though, let’s set aside any questions about the effectiveness, precise definition, and the long term implications. What it all comes down to after that hinges on one precept: We claim to be the good guys. The good guys don’t take the easy way out. The good guys don’t perpetuate fear and use it as a means to abandon the civility and humanity which they claim separates them from that which they fight.

This debate is nothing new, even to a relatively young nation such as America. The Salem witch trials, slavery, the Phoenix Program, police brutality against minorities and homosexuals; these all have common elements. They were rationalized during their respective times, but time has shown them to be distasteful, reprehensible, and regrettable. This trend has already begun. It’s only a matter of time before those who defend the use of torture this time around are seen for what they are: short sighted fools willing to take the easy way out rather than rise above. Hopefully this investigation by the Justice Department will illuminate this.

Since I talked a bit about Penn & Teller’s atheiskeptihumanist-style show “Bullshit!” yesterday, I thought this might be appropriate to mention.  While I was rambling around the Internet last night, I came upon a short, two-part series that Richard Dawkins did in much the same vein.  It’s called “Enemies of Reason,” and features much of the same material that one might find on “Bullshit!”  I suppose I should confess that I’m not a tremendous fan of Richard Dawkins’; he’s certainly a great evolutionary biologist, but his philosophical acumen has always struck me as somewhat less certain.  Still, he’s been an impressive force for populizing atheism and making it at least acceptable to talk about religion in mixed company, and those are important works.

In any case, as condescending and shrill as Dawkins can sometimes be, he’s miles beyond the outright mockery and antics of Penn & Teller; there’s nothing wrong with antics or mockery per se, but I’ve often been struck, while watching “Bullshit!”, with the wish that Penn & Teller–who are obviously quite intelligent–would engage with the subjects of their episodes a bit more.  There’s never any discussion or argument; all the narration and mockery is done via voice-over.  As Lord Scarab pointed out in his comment to my last post, that makes for good “preaching to the choir” style entertainment, but doesn’t advance the cause a whole lot.  That’s why I was so pleased to find this series by Dawkins.

“Enemies of Reason” seems to be freely available online in two 45 minute chunks.  The first episode focuses on the notion of irrationality generally, and features Dawkins interviewing and talking to a variety of religious/spiritual/irrational subjects.  The second episode–which should strike viewers in the United States as eerily appropriate–deals specifically with anti-rationality as it pertains to the health care industry; Dawkins talks to various “alternative” medicine practitioners about what they do, organizes a few minor studies, and so on.  It’s good stuff.  He’s uniformly polite throughout the series (that might be a feature or a bug, depending on your viewpoint), and is never overtly argumentative.  The characteristic Dawkins smirk only made one appearance that I noticed, and he really can’t be blamed for it: a woman was earnestly telling him that DNA is a “big deal these days” in human evolution, as we’re just now starting to rediscover the rest of our DNA strands–while most of us today only have two strands (for a double helix), apparently all humans had twelve strands of DNA when we lived in Atlantis.  After Atlantis, we “forgot who we were” and (somehow) lost those DNA strands.  I would have been smirking too, if I were Dawkins.

That’s not to say that he’s totally non-confrontational, though: on more than one occasion he says something like “I think you’re wrong, and here’s why.”  In any case, if you enjoy this sort of thing, it’s a very nice little series.  I wish they’d made more of them, as I strongly prefer this style to the somewhat more low-brown style of “Bullshit!”, but I’ll take what I can get.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Enemies of Reason (Part 1)

Enemies of Reason (Part 2)

As you probably have heard if you follow our news feed, the Catholic League is calling for Penn & Teller’s Showtime show “Bullshit!” to be cancelled after an (as-yet unseen) season finale attacking Catholicism.  For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing “Bullshit!”–which, as you might be able to tell already, I quite enjoy–I suppose a few words are in order.  Penn & Teller are well known for their sensationalized skepticism and hatred of trickery; they are magicians who, despite being world-class illusionists, have been thrown out of the Magic Castle in Los Angles for repeatedly (and gleefully) revealing the sleight-of-hand behind various magic tricks.  Professional magicians frown on this sort of behavior, but Penn & Teller maintain that if knowing how the trick is done makes it any less amazing, then the trick wasn’t all that amazing to begin with.  They are famous, for example, for doing a version of the common Cups and Balls illusion with clear plastic cups–the trick is, at least to these eyes, no less amazing.  Indeed, knowing precisely how they’re doing it makes it all the more interesting: your brain knows what’s going on, but the speed and precision with which they execute the trick leaves you still gaping in wonder.  For my money, that’s better magic than a hidden (and often mundane) prop.  On “Bullshit!” they take this skepticism and general hostility to mysterious pretension public (as it were) by presenting a series of short episodes (they’re in their seventh season now) dedicated to debunking various ideas, movements, organizations, or practices that they find to be, well, bullshitty.  They’ve taken aim at organized religion before, but have also had episodes attacking astrology, alternative medicine, recycling, the anti-war movement, and probably at least one bit of ideology that you, dear reader, hold sacred.  That’s just how they roll, and they’re spectacularly entertaining while they do it.

Now, it seems rather clear that some attacks on bullshitty (I rather like that adjective) beliefs, while they might be amusing, do little to actually advance the cause of skepticism and rational thought: the recent 4Chan (note the distinct lack of a hyperlink there) attacks on Christian Facebookers comes to mind as a prime example.  While the defacements might be good for a cheap chuckle from the atheist crowd (yeah, I giggled a little bit), I think most of us can agree that this is not the sort of thing that the community as a whole ought to take ownership of–indeed, it’s something that ought to be condemned.  If our goal is to convince believers that not only are atheists generally nice people (or at least no less nice than any other arbitrary group) but that there’s a good chance that we’re right on the metaphysical questions, then this sort of deliberately inflammatory route is probably not the one that we want to take.  Where, though, does “Bullshit!” fall on the spectrum?  Is it closer to the 4Chan end, or closer to (say) the thoughtful, reasoned, articulate criticisms of Dan Dennett?  Should the atheist community stand behind Penn & Teller as agents of change, or should we decry them as the televised equivalent of 4chan?

Let’s explore this question a little bit.  We’ve admitted the 4chan attacks as a paradigm case of the sort of thing we want to avoid, so let’s start by enumerating the qualities that we want to eschew here.  First (and perhaps most importantly), we might notice that the 4chan attacks were directed at individuals, not at any particular set of principles or ideas: the Facebook pages that got defaced were the private pages of actual people, not the ideological charters of some organization.  That certainly counts for something: these were the digital equivalent of ad hominem attacks on religion: personal attacks on the believers rather than on the belief itself.  That’s something we ought to avoid, both on rhetorical grounds and on moral grounds–it won’t win us any converts, and (that point aside) it’s just the wrong thing to do.  What else?  The 4chan attacks were all entirely negative in nature: at no point–at least, no point that I’m aware of–was a positive point made during the attacks; the purpose was just to deface, not to put forward a constructive solution or make a constructive argument.  Note that the first and second points are not necessarily mutually entailed: it would have been entirely possible (for instance) for the 4chaners to deface personal Facebook profiles and replace them with long, well-reasoned treatises on the philosophical problems of supernaturalism.  Doing so still wouldn’t have been right–it still would have constituted a kind of ad hominem, it seems to me–but it at least would have lessened their sins.  Anything else?  Well, we might also take issue with the fact that these attacks were conducted anonymously–no individuals took ownership for any of the actions.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there are times when anonymity and group action can be good for intellectual discourse (e.g. as when anonymous groups function as industry whistle-blowers), but this is not one of those times.  Indeed, the anonymity of the group only seems to underscore their lack of desire to advance the discourse with their actions; they wanted to cause chaos, nothing more.

OK, so we have a few criteria here.  The most noteworthy respects in which the 4chan attacks are to be decried at: (1) their ad hominem style, (2) their lack of positive intellectual contribution, and (3) their anonymity.  How do Penn & Teller fare?  The results, it seems to me, are mixed.  The show’s tone is certainly somewhat ad hominem in tone: there are copious uses of words like ‘moron,’ ‘idiot,’ ‘fuck-tard,’ and virtually any other iteration of that sort of thing you can come up with; Penn & Teller aren’t shy about attacking individuals with whom they disagree.  However, their attacks don’t stop there: they continue on to deal with the concepts, ideas, and belief-systems driving the individuals they attack–they’re not just aiming at individuals, but also at the belief systems that–they argue–actually make the people “fuck-tards” in the first place.  That criticism–of intellectual principles–is of varying quality, but it is at least present.  What about (2)?  P&T fare a bit better here–they’re never shy about presenting their own ideas about how to fix the systems they critique, or about what beliefs they think would make the world a better place.  They’re not presenting detailed arguments for their positions, but in a 30-minute television show, I’m not sure we ought to expect them to–they are, at least, presenting the positions they hold and making some semblance of a positive argument.  (3) is clearest of all: appearing on a television show with your name in the title is about as far from being anonymous as one can get.  They very loudly and proudly take ownership of their ideas and actions–both for good and for ill.  They’ve admitted bias in the past, and at least make a cursory effort to revise their opinions when they’re shown to be in error.  More importantly (at least for this criterion), they’re putting themselves out there and acknowledging the opinions being expressed as their own.  They have at least some of the courage of their convictions.

Are P&T perfect?  Certainly not–they’d be the first to admit that, most likely.  Is the show perfect?  Again, I think they’d be among the first to say that it isn’t.  Are they biased, sometimes one-sided, crude, prone to ad hominems, and generally academically suspect?  Sure, but they’re running a TV show, not a university lecture series.  At the very least, they are exposing people to the controversy surrounding some of these issues, and they’re doing it in an entertaining and eminently watchable way.  They’re also equal opportunity in their attacks: contrary to what the Catholic League would have you think, only a small minority of the show’s content as been directed at Catholicism, or even religion in general; the vast majority has been spent on other instances of so-called bullshit, including some bullshit that I happen to agree with.  They are, I think, doing more good than harm.

What do you think?  Where should the line be drawn on this issue?  What’s productive, and what’s not?  How low can we sink in trying to make these ideas public before we’re guilty of doing something wrong?

This week Hemant Mehta from the Friendly Atheist blog joins us to talk about his recent woes with the Illinois Family Institute. A woman named Laurie Higgins wants to let families know that they have an atheist blogger for a math teacher and Hemant was kind enough to come on the show and let us know how things are going at school. Laurie Higgins was unavailable for comment.

No seriously, I called and asked for an interview and everything.

In the news:
Remember the burqa you bought to swim in? Well, it turns out you don’t need it anymore. Damn. A priest has elevated child abuse to a new height and bus drivers are martyrs for Jesus. If you plan on killing your children, make sure you do it for religious reasons, apparently that is a bullet proof defense. Scientists may have just proven that you didn’t just evolve from a monkey, you evolved from a FRICKIN COMET. Praying at Lunch: go directly to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. And of course, if you need your money cleansed of The Jesus, go ahead and send it to me. I will TOTALLY take care of that for you. No problem!

Richard has some pretty sweet shirts to sell over at Atheist Nexus, go check them out.

And I’m running a blog contest to see who the next writer on the Atheist News Blog will be, come to the site and take a look.

Stream this episode!

In the continuing saga of religious clothing in secular environments (such as this story) Michigan’s Supreme Court has passed an order that allows lower state courts “reasonable control over the appearance of parties and witnesses” so as to “ensure that the demeanor of such persons may be observed and assessed by the fact-finder and ensure the accurate identification of such person.”

The order was prompted by 2006 small claims case in which a judge ordered a female defendant to remove her niqab, a traditional Muslim garment covering the entire face except the eyes, in order to better ascertain the honesty of her testimony. She refused to remove it the presence of a male judge, leading to the case being dismissed.

The order is being opposed by both religious and secular organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relation and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The argument for this order is a practical one. Judges in lower courts have a large responsibility in determining truth from fiction. Anyone who’s ever played poker knows that facial cues are an important part of this.

In the interest of being thorough, let’s take a look at religious angle. The woman’s refusal was on the grounds that she was a practicing Muslim. However, according to several Muslim scholars on IslamOnline.net uncovering of the face and hands is permissible for a woman if the local country’s laws require it for practical purposes such as identification or medical treatment.

The purpose was practical and she still refused. Now with this court order, such refusals in the future would be a violation of both state, and her own religious laws. Ideally this should resolve such conflicts and allow small court judges in, in Michigan at least,  to better do their jobs.

For all of the logical fallacies and convenient assumptions of religion or any system of beliefs based on faith over reason, they have one advantage over a logical, scientific, and non-theist way of approaching the world.

This advantage is definition. Nearly any religion has a clearly defined sense of right and wrong, however archaic and misguided it may be, and from these definitions religious leaders can interpret how the world should be and what it is they are striving for. Atheist on the other hand are left to figure it out more or less for themselves, extrapolating from some sort of golden rule (such as “Don’t be an asshole”).

For example, ask twenty different atheists about capital punishment and they’ll probably give at least a dozen different answers for all sorts of different reasons. Go to the local pentecostal service or orthodox synagogue and the range of answers is likely to be a sight less diverse. Sure there’ll be a percentage among any congregation that disagrees with the organization on the finer points of policy, but that still doesn’t change the fact that they still give their time, their support, and most likely their money to that organization.

This single mindedness can be very unifying. This unity can be a potent social tool. Rallying around temples was one of the factors that led to the first cities being built in the fertile crescent. Since then, large groups of people united in purpose under the banner of religion operating with the absolute certainty that they are right have been a political and social force to be reckoned with.

My point is that religions by definition have a level of organization that atheism doesn’t come close to. While we can’t (and probably shouldn’t necessarily) be as homogenous in our values and philosophies, an important step towards greater unity is each and every one of us knowing what we believe, what we don’t, and why. Going further, how does this figure in to your picture of an ideal world? What is this world like? When do we win?

Unless these question can be answered, or are at least considered, any progress towards the truth, either on a social or personal level, can only go so far. It’s much harder to move forward without at least a vague idea of where one wants to go. Nearly all religions know where they’re going. They got off easy by getting the word from a higher power. We have a more troublesome, but ultimately more rewarding situation. We are left to pursue the truth borne not of faith, but of reason, science, and each other.

Who am I?  Why am I here?  It seems only appropriate that a philosophy blog begins with these questions; Dan Dennett says that it’s an occupational hazard of the profession that we philosophers get asked to define the meaning of life over dinner (or over the Interwebs, as the case may be).  That’s not what I mean by posing these questions-though I won’t promise that I won’t, in the course of our discussions here, address that tricky subject.  My aim, at least initially, is much more modest: I want to tell you a little bit about who I am, what I believe, and how I ended up writing these words.  I want to set the stage for what will follow.  Those uninterested in inspirational words can stop reading now and pick up at the next post, which (I hope) will be a good deal more argumentative.  First, though, the mood must be established.

In an important sense, it matters less who I am, and more what I do (that’s a philosophical claim, for those keeping track)-let’s start there, then.  I’m a member of that rare and reviled group called “the Professional Academic.”  I get paid to do what I’m doing right now-that is, to think carefully, and then write about my thoughts.  Yes, it is a pretty sweet gig, if I do say so myself.  Still, there’s an old joke in academia that goes something like this: if you’re at a cocktail party with people of mixed professions, and someone asks you what you do and you say you’re an educator, eyes immediately glaze over.  If you’re at a cocktail party with educators and someone asks you what sort of education you’re in and you say you’re a college professor, eyes immediately glaze over.  If you’re at a cocktail party with a bunch of college professors and someone asks you what sort of professor you are and you say that you’re a philosopher, eyes immediately glaze over.  I’m a doctoral student rather than a full professor-a professorial pupae-but the point, I think, remains: something there is that doesn’t love a philosopher.

Why?  We’re an amicable enough bunch (at least when not arguing with one another), and we certainly shower more often than the engineers.  Here’s my guess: philosophers make people uncomfortable in a way that engineers (and poets and chemists and computer scientists and historians) don’t; in a very real sense, it is our job to make people uncomfortable-that’s what they pay us for.  The philosopher is much like the court jester of old in this regard: we get away with saying what no one else can get away with saying, and maybe that’s just because people can laugh off our words-oh, that’s just the philosopher, up to his old tricks.  The good student of history will note that wise rulers knew enough to listen to their jesters when they spoke, though: “The mind that’s afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never create the brilliantly original,” says David Brin.  Words that make us uncomfortable often do so because they strike at truths we’d rather not acknowledge-they “break the spell,” to borrow from Dennett once again.  This, I think, is at the heart of what good philosophy does (or ought to do): break the spell, and tell people what they might not want to hear.

It’s no secret that philosophy thrives when worldviews are in turmoil: the birthplace of philosophy as a coherent discipline was Ancient Greece, that archetypal cross-road of ideas and cultures.  Philosophy flourished in the Athens of 2500 years ago precisely because the comfortable bubble that the Greeks had constructed-the explanatory bubble of warring gods and mischievous spirits-found itself threatened by new cultures, religions, and explanations: by new ideas.  Philosophy developed as a way of trying to make sense of this turmoil:  as a way of trying to find a steady point in the intellectual maelstrom.  With Aristotle, it seemed that the Greeks had found this point, and the Aristotelian system kept the world comfortable for more than a thousand years.

Sometime in the middle of the 17^th century, though, that creeping edge of nervousness began to overtake humanity again, though this time the culprit was singular and clear: science.  Science’s attack on humanity’s comfort was well-organized and multi-pronged-the springing of a trap designed by a master general.  Copernican physics threatened our special place at the center of the solar system; biology threatened our special place as animate things in a fundamentally inanimate world; evolution threatened our special place as the chosen species, earnestly (and gravely) assuring us that we were just another “rational animal.”  I am taking some liberties with the timeline, I know, but be patient and allow the jester some poetic license.  Amid this cognitive vertigo, philosophy-more-or-less silent for centuries-found its voice again; it is no accident, after all, that Descartes’ primary project in his seminal Meditations on First Philosophy was to establish something “firm and lasting.”  In a world where the steady, soulless march of the natural sciences threatened to eradicate all that humanity had believed since we first arose, an Archimedean point was sought-a point on which humanity might stand, move the world, and be unmoved in turn.  The reader can judge the relative success or failure of this project for himself.

Science, for its part, has paid little attention to our collective discomfort.  It has rolled on, oblivious to the comforting fictions crushed beneath its treads, and we find ourselves at another crossroad today.  Computer science threatens our very notion of what it is to be a thinking thing (so much the worse for Descartes’ immovable point?); quantum mechanics tells us that reality might, in reality, be very different from the way that it seems to us.  Astrophysics tells us that we are even further from the center of the universe than Copernicus might have imagined-indeed, it tells us that the universe is a bounded shape that has no center.  The mind rebels at it all, and philosophy, as always, thrives-a brightly colored fungus feeding on the decay of our parochialism.  The philosopher might be the jester, but the philosopher is also the steady hand in the earthquake of ideas; the candle held up to the menacing shape of science; the voice that says “Now see!  There’s no reason to cower after all-what seemed to be the Specter of Insanity approaching is just so much shadow and nerves.  Stand tall and let’s make sense of this!”

“Together, we can make sense of this.”

Moreover, we can make sense of this without compromise-without backing away from the brilliant light that science has shed for us.  Plato’s prisoner, first emerging from the cave of his ignorance, found that the light of the sun-the light of knowledge-hurt and burned his eyes.  He wanted to flee back into the comfort and the dark, back into the easy, cool shadows of superstition and ancient wisdom.  As he resisted this fear, though, he found that he could, by degrees, see the world around him more and more clearly; he could see that the shadows in the cave, which had seemed full of life, power, and usefulness before, were now unmasked as nothing but pale reflections of the harsh, stunning, and beautiful reality above.  We too must resist the temptation to flee; we must resist the temptation to turn away from the light of reason and run back to the comfort of supernaturalism, because as soothing as it is, as real as it seems from this perspective within the cave, as much as we think we can’t live without it, the view from Inside is a lie.  It has been, historically speaking, a rather good and helpful lie-we wouldn’t be where we are as a species without it-but the time has come to cast it aside and step into the light of the natural world with eyes open and shoulders squared.  The time has come to face reality on its own terms.

And that, at last, is what brings me to you-what brings philosophy to you.  The journey is bound to be full of discomfort-we’ll have more than our share of mental blisters before the climb is done-but the vista at the top is, I think, worth it.  The view from above the clouds is beautiful, and it is beautiful in spite of (or perhaps because of?) the fact that we find no golden throne, no heavenly host, no trumpeted clarion calls to greet us as we break through into the light-above the clouds, there is only sky and sky and sky.  I do not claim to be your guide on this climb-even I, admittedly no paragon of self-deprecation, have enough humility to demure in the face of that title-but rather just hope to accompany you, pointing out some of the major landmarks along the way, and having some of the same pointed out to me.  I might help you avoid a few missteps and precarious drops, but only in virtue of my training as a mountaineer on smaller climbs-I suspect (and hope) you’ll pull me back from more than a few sheer drops as well.  Let’s make the climb together, and explore what it means to see the world from atop Natural Peak.  I look forward to the ascent, and I’ll see you on the trail.

The Atheist News site is now looking for full time bloggers!

This is the home of the Atheist News podcast, but that’s not all it is. It has always been my intention to turn this sucker into a full blown atheist news blogging site and the time has finally come to cut the ribbon. As of now, I have three gentlemen who will be blogging here on current events topics of interest to the more secular minded among us (formal introductions to follow,) but three is not enough. Over the next few months, I’ll be adding more writers to the staff and you could be one of them!

So here’s the skinny: we’re holding something of an essay contest to help us pick who our next staff member will be. In order to enter, you need only write a single news blog post on the subject of your choice (details below) and submit it to us. We will read through all of the submissions and pick a winner on September 30th.

The winner of the contest will have their own news blog on the Atheist News website! They will undoubtedly be turned into overnight celebrities and be buried in fame and groupies nigh instantaneously.

The deadline for submissions is September 26th, so get to writing!

–moJoe
Executive Editor

Contest Details:

Pick any story published within the last year that you think will interest our atheist readership and write an article about it in 500 words or less.

You can include links to multiple articles and pictures if you’d like, but please; no posts based on videos.

Write as you would write for the site.

The post can be objective or humorous or an opinion piece, but it should remain consistent in tone through-out.

If you are going to quote an article, please cite your sources.

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Brother Richard kicks the show off by talking about his trip to LA and ends the show by singing “Burqas for Jesus.” And while everything that comes before it is diminished by the horrid taint of his terrible singing, as long as you turn off the show before he starts, you should be OK.

This week: don’t think that just because you’re only one year old you’ll escape the awesome and ridiculous intolerance of religion, God has plans for your heath care, the Army of the ALMIGHTY is privatizing, Ben Stein learns what the true meaning of EXPELLED is, more good news from the APA, the Catholics have no idea what they are doing with your money and you now have the freedom to do whatever you want with your goat. Congratulations!

Stream this episode!